Re: Time to heat up the new module discussion

[Dan Winship <danw novell com>]

Darren Kenny wrote:
> Again I think people seriously need to get out of the mind-set that there is
> only one desktop user on a machine - so a couple of meg for 1 user isn't a lot -
> but for 100 users on a single machine (even with 256Mb of RAM per user) there is
> a huge impact in that "tiny" additional platform being loaded.

> ... This is why
> we need a Core GNOME that isn't dependent on such frameworks.

"Core GNOME" might work for a little while, but I think we need to get
beyond the "One GNOME Policy". Shipping a desktop full of innovative
(ie, C#- and python-based) apps is as necessary for Novell as it is
problematic for Sun. GNOME will never be able to come up with a single
one-size-fits-all list of modules that can cover 100-user Sun Rays,
SLED/RHEL on top-of-the-line laptops, Debian on someone's old Pentium
III, Gentoo on overclocked gamer boxes, Maemo on the 770, etc, etc, etc.

Maybe the thing to do is to weaken the sense of the Desktop release.
Rather than being "this is what we think every GNOME Desktop should
have", it would be "these are programs that we think can be a nutritious
part of your GNOME Desktop", with no implication that everyone should
have all of them. This would also allow us to include redundant apps in
the Desktop (eg, recognizing that Rhythmbox and Banshee are both good
GNOME music players, and neither of them is going to go away any time
soon), and not have to pick sides. The downstream distros/users could
then pick a set of packages that fit together to meet their needs.
Which, honestly, is what already happens. The only difference is that
now we'd be helping the distros/users out, by pointing out specific
GNOME-based packages that we think are cool/useful/usable/stable, and by
keeping those packages' release cycles in sync with the rest of GNOME.

-- Dan